DP25018 History of Libraries

 Copyright TLS

On the dust jacket of this “fragile” history of libraries is a photograph of one that looks anything but. Towering cast-iron bookstacks dwarf a lone figure. This is the old Cincinnati Public Library, the nineteenth-century epitome of the library as a civic and scholarly institution. The site where it stood now accommodates a car park. The collection outgrew the building – which was demolished in 1955 – and was moved to a new home. Still, no need for a “prolonged lament for libraries lost”, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen point out. All libraries are temporary: “a repeating cycle of creation and dispersal, decay and reconstruction, tends to be the historical norm”.

Observing this cycle here is like watching a time-lapse video: vast collections are built, burned down or sold off, and rebuilt, sometimes in a matter of paragraphs. Having previously co-written a detailed history of the seventeenth-century Dutch book market, The Bookshop of the World (2019), the authors have made the commendable decision to pan out dramatically. The result is a history of all libraries, putatively everywhere but mostly in the West, starting in 700 BC Mesopotamia and ending with Google Books. Despite this staggering range, the authors manage never to seem in a rush, or to skimp on incidental detail. There are forays into the manuscript-collecting habits of Burgundian princes, the Islamic scholarship of fourteenth-century Timbuktu, and the impact of the Great Northern War of 1700–21 on the university collections of Tartu, Estonia. We’re given mini-histories on subjects only tangential to that of libraries: Mills and Boon, early cinema, BBC radio. Holding it all together is a keen eye for stories of individual lives that are representative of something larger.

Contrary to our conception of libraries as collective, public endeavours, most of this history is taken up with the private efforts of people building libraries for personal use (or personal cachet). Only in the mid-nineteenth century did the library as a free public collection emerge. The landscape’s “charismatic megafauna” – the institutional libraries with lots of “symbolic capital” – have historically been the exception, not the rule. For all its civic pomp, the imperial libraries of ancient Rome were equalled and even surpassed by the personal collections of its professionals and philosophers: Cicero, Galen, and the Elder and Younger Pliny. Centuries later, the arrival of print brought libraries not a burst of democratizing renewal but a…